


Goodnight You

by Deejaymil



Series: 2018 Advent Adventures with Blythe and Deejay [6]
Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reid is Jack Frost (sort of), Dreams and Nightmares, Fear, Friendship, Gen, Running Away, Sacrifice, Seasonal Spirits and Guardians, Winter Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-20
Packaged: 2019-09-21 07:13:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17039171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deejaymil/pseuds/Deejaymil
Summary: When Emily was thirteen, she’d almost died. She was told the story many times over her life, told again and again how grateful she must be for the breath in her lungs and the life in her heart. She didn’t remember any of that night, just that it had been dark and cold, and that she’d been alone in the snow. And, from that night on, she had a terrible fear of winter.Winter, as though it resented this, did everything it could to change her mind.





	1. Winter, Be My Friend

**Author's Note:**

> Sort of a fusion with Rise of the Guardians (2012). You don't need to be familiar with Rise of the Guardians to read this since I'm pretty much only borrowing concepts.
> 
> THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A ONE SHOT BUT IT GREW LEGS AND A PLOT.

When Emily was thirteen, she’d almost died. She was told the story many times over her life, told again and again how grateful she must be for the breath in her lungs and the life in her heart. Her teachers would tell her it was a miracle; her priests that it was an act of God. Her mother said very little about it at all, just that it was simply an act of the man who’d been driving by close enough to see a strange flare in the night. And the only image she had of the incident was a picture cut from a newspaper article she’d never read: an image of a small girl with dark, dark hair being carried from a snowbound forest wrapped in the jacket she still had folded neatly in the bottom of her closet.

Emily didn’t remember any of it, just that it had been dark and cold and she’d been alone. From then on, she’d had a terrible fear of the snow. One near-death-experience in a flurrying blizzard was enough for her, she decided, and did her best to keep away from stormy weather. This unease extended to the night sky as well; never was she as uncomfortable as when she stood under the unblinking eye of the moon in the sky above, as though it was watching her and only her. Superstition, she was sure, but despite this she made she never to look directly at it, as though it was as blinding as the sun.

Winter, as though it understood and resented her fear, never raged around her like it had that night. From that day forward, any snowfall she was out in, however reluctantly, was gentle and kind, the wind keeping away and the cold barely nipping. If she was in the right climate for snow days, she was gifted with a disproportionate amount of them: those few winters she spent in a true winter while still at school, she found that the snow did everything it could to tempt her out into it, with perfect sledding days and the right kind of snow for snowballs and, even once, waking up to find a half-built snowman waiting for her outside in the front yard on a day she’d been dreaded because of a test at school, which was cancelled. The frost drew early-morning pictures on her windows as though to welcome her out, and she drew her curtains tight and stayed inside beside the fire instead, no matter how tempting outside may have seemed.

Sometimes, she pulled the jacket out and studied it closely. It wasn’t hers. She knew it wasn’t: for one, the name stitched into the tag was S.R. And it was a boy’s jacket, with dinosaur roaring stitched into the back, from an age where she’d still been dressed as her mother’s ideal of a little girl.

She wondered often about whose jacket it was, and how she’d come to possess it.

And she grew up.

 

After Doyle, nothing really shook her, not even Aaron Hotchner and his near-refusal to accept her into his team. After all, she knew that she could do this job and do it well, her mother be damned.

Eventually, Hotch would come to believe that.

The rest of the team took their time to accept her too. JJ was first, followed shortly by Garcia—“I don’t like change, but I do like _you,”_ she informed Emily over drinks one night. Then Morgan, although Emily could tell Morgan was one of those that keenly felt the hole Elle had left behind. But Morgan also appreciated good, and she was good.

Then there was Reid. He was the strangest man she’d ever had the fortune to meet in her life, which was saying something as she’d always had somewhat of a knack for finding kindred spirits of weirdness. But Reid? He took not only the gold in peculiar, but also the silver, bronze, participation ribbon, and the cake they gave everyone else as well. He dressed twenty years out of his time, as though he was overcompensating in order to seem older than he was by dressing in his grandfather’s clothes, and carried a knobby cane that he often forgot to use. He never met with the team outside of work, never invited them home or came out for drinks, and JJ admitted one day that she’d never actually been able to contact him by phone at all: he just arrived when needed and that was that.

“He has a knack,” said JJ with a shrug, as though that was all that was needed to work here.

Emily, intrigued by this quiet man with the eyes he hid behind overlong hair that seemed to have a life of its own, did her best to connect with him. It began with coffee, delivered to his desk every morning in a cardboard holder alongside her own. He always thanked her, looking surprised every time, and she’d watched carefully as he’d slide his long, pale fingers around the paper cup and wince with every sip.

“Not sweet enough?” she asked. “Morgan warned me you use buckets of sugar.”

“It’s wonderfully sweet, thank you,” he responded, hiding his gaze behind that hair once more. His eyes were hazel, she noted. Changeable in different lights. “It’s just very hot.”

The next day, Emily requested the coffee be colder. Dutifully she delivered it to him; once more, he commented on the temperature.

“Sorry,” he said with a grin that didn’t meet his eyes. “I’m not much for warmth.”

Bemused, the next day she ordered iced coffee instead.

“Wonderful,” he beamed, giving her that same almost-sad smile. “This is wonderful, thank you.”

She thought about that a lot.

 

Reid didn’t like to be touched. His stated reason was that he was a bit of a germaphobe, but Emily watched him carefully and noted that he was never wary about crime scenes with biological hazards splattered everywhere, and nor was he shy about administering first aid when needed. He even shared a water bottle with JJ one particularly warm day when everyone was drooping but Reid especially, draining the water without a complaint as he hunched down into himself and tapped his cane irritably between his feet.

Germaphobe, he was not, Emily decided. She waited for her moment and then struck, lurking behind him and then stumbling with a yelp, grabbing his hand when he turned and instinctively reached out to her to stop her hitting the ground. His hand was cold. That was the first and only thing she noted about it, staring at their hands locked together with the chill of his touch sinking deep.

He yanked away, stepping back with his eyes as fearful as they always were, other hand knuckled tight around the cane he didn’t need to walk with.

“Sorry,” she said, knowing her eyes were wide and not knowing how to hide how startling his hands on hers had been. “Clumsy, that’s me. Always clumsy.”

He didn’t answer, just gave her a _look_ and strode away without limping.

She wondered.

 

He always seemed exhausted but never slept. Emily watched him on jet rides home, how he’d curl into a chair and stare tiredly out the window, chin propped on his knee and without speaking unless spoken to. The few times Morgan managed to coax him out of his shell, he seemed bright and excited to share his thoughts, but those times were rare. Mostly he was like he was now as she watched him: withdrawn, fretful, and shy. She wanted more than anything to see him smile truly, right up to those worried eyes.

Very good at his job, Emily noted, but only when people took care not to notice him. The only people he seemed to be comfortable with were the team, which didn’t quite include her yet, and if others were around he’d clam up and try to blend in with the background. Hotch seemed to allow it because the man was a genius with the kind of analytical mind Emily envied, but she wondered what kind of a life he had outside of work—and whether he had a life at all.

She wondered, as only someone who knows how it is to be lonely right down to the bones could wonder, if he was lonely too.

 

It was an out-of-state case when it happened; Emily was asleep until she wasn’t, suddenly snapping awake with the alertness of knowing something was happening nearby. The hotel they were in was small in this tiny town, with only enough rooms that their presence filled the place and with several of the rooms connected by a shared courtyard. What had woken her was the click slide of a glass door being slid open. Not her glass door. She suspected the one adjacent to her: Reid’s.

Slipping out of bed, the cold air snuck in, touching at her toes and any bared skin. Shivering already and surprised that winter had swept in so fast when it was barely November, she slid a robe overtop her sleepwear and padded quietly to the outer door, peering out from around the curtain.

He stood out there staring up at the sky above. She blinked to see that he was barefoot despite the snow beginning to fall, despite the freezing air, standing almost tiptoe as though he was eager to touch the stars above. Head tipped back and turning in a slow circle, she saw it: he was smiling.

Truly.

Shocked by this, and a little awed, she slid the door open and walked out there to join him, grateful for her lined slippers and for the thick clouds covering the moon above. He didn’t say a word as she came to stand beside him and look curiously up at what he was watching, just kept smiling with the exhaustion that lined his face for as long as she’d known him finally fading.

“Isn’t the snow beautiful?” he asked her, reaching up to the flakes falling from above. His cane hooked over one arm knocked against his hip, and she watched as the snow almost seemed to eddy gleefully to his outstretched hand. A wind lashed around them, playfully tugging at her clothes and his, whipping his hair up into a chaotic mess. He laughed, turning around with the wind that turned with him, and she stood motionless. This didn’t feel like a moment she should be privy to, but it also felt important that she see this. It was some step towards understanding the world they shared, even if he saw it in such a different way than she did.

“You must miss the snow when it melts,” was all she finally managed to say, watching his expression carefully as he answered.

“I do,” was his response. “It’s the loneliest feeling in the world.”

She wondered.

 

After that, the dreams began. She never remembered them when she woke, just that they were filled with snow and laughter and a hand in hers leading her through a white-bound forest. Sometimes she was flying through the air; others, she was effortlessly running barefoot across ice and sliding wildly with her heart singing from the fun of it all. For the first time, the snow didn’t frighten her. It felt beautiful instead of terrifying.

In every dream, the moon watched.

Reid changed as winter deepened. His smiles were faster, his movements energised. The lethargy of the summer months faded completely, replaced by a spring in his step and a joyous grin that she earned every time she stepped into the bullpen and wished him a good morning. Emily, seeing him like this, longed to know this man. His mysteries intrigued her wholly, his happiness delighting her. She wondered if he’d fallen in love and if that was why he smiled more. Maybe some pretty thing had caught his eye and chased away his sadness.

But that couldn’t be it because sometimes, when it seemed that he thought no one was watching, he looked worried once more.

In February, right on the cusp of winter ending, Reid went missing during a case. One minute there, the next gone, just like that. They were terrified for him for five whole hours, until Emily looked up from her seat in Hankel’s house to find Reid walking in the door with his cane in hand and expression mild. Hankel, they found neatly cuffed in a shack at a distant parish, with no recollection of how Reid had overpowered him to escape.

After, she approached him.

“If you’re here to ask me how I got away, Hotch has already grilled me—” Reid began.

“I’m not,” she replied, despite wondering how he had got away and also travelled the whole way back seemingly on foot and after having effortlessly disarmed Hankel. “I wanted to know if you’re okay. I was worried about you.”

He looked at her, startled.

“No offense, Emily, but you don’t seem like anything worries you,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you afraid.”

She could have listed the things that frightened her, but they were best left in the past where they belonged: snowstorms and Doyle and dying alone and the moon’s watchful eyes above her.

“Are you okay?” she asked instead, stepping forward and brushing her fingers against his sleeve, where fingers of frost marked the stiff material. He shook his arm. The frost faded, like it had never been, and she wondered if she’d imagined it.

“I’m okay,” he promised her with another one of those bright-but-worried smiles. “And I’ve never had anyone worry about me before, not in a long time. Thank you. That’s… validating.”

“Anytime,” she promised him, meaning it completely.

 

Three years into her job, something changed. An Unsub unlike any other she’d seen before or would again, one that struck right to the heart of their team: The Reaper.

The case when he reappeared was a rough one. Hotch was taking it hard, taking it personally, and everyone was on edge, even Reid. Emily kept close to him, wishing it was close to winter every time she glanced at him and saw him looking tired and taut.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked him, but he wouldn’t answer.

They were plagued by bad dreams. The few times they slept throughout that bloody four days, Emily dreamed of blizzards choking her and the moon crashing down from above and destroying the world as she knew it. She dreamed of Doyle creeping closer and of every case they’d ever failed; she dreamed of her team dead and her dying and no one there to grieve.

Judging from the swollen eyes of the team, their dreams were hardly any kinder, if they’d slept to dream at all. Only Reid didn’t seem any more exhausted than usual, since exhausted seemed to be his baseline outside of the winter months, but the sheer output of work he was putting out concerned her; there was no way he was managing that much analytics while also sleeping at all.

“I can barely focus,” Morgan said on this final day, all of them tense from the bus massacre the night before and Hotch’s minor breakdown. “Every time I close my eyes, I end up in a nightmare. This case is messing my head up…”

Emily watched Reid by the whiteboard, seeing how he’d tensed horribly at the word ‘nightmare’. Even now, that tension hadn’t faded.

“Same,” Emily said carefully, JJ nodding along. Hotch and Rossi weren’t there. “Reid?” He looked at her, looking pale and fraught. “Are you having nightmares too?”

“No,” he rasped, saying nothing more no matter how much she pushed.

 

She found him crouched by the puddled blood of George Foyet, gloves on but staring oddly at the red splashed everywhere.

“He’s definitely dead,” Emily said. “No way he lost this much blood and survived.”

“Mmm,” was all Reid answered, touching a gloved finger to the corner of a still-wet pool. When his finger came away, it gleamed red but, for a heartbeat, she could have sworn she saw darkness within the wet.

And Reid looked terrified.

 

The months that followed were grim. The Reaper evading them felt like a failure too monumental to escape, as though it soured everything they’d done since. Winter came and Reid didn’t perk up like usual, even more withdrawn than ever and with his behaviour positively paranoid as his introversion grew. Emily wasn’t sure she’d heard him say a word to anyone who wasn’t the team for months, but no one seemed overly inclined to panic about this despite admitting that it was weird.

“He’ll tell us if he needs help,” said Morgan.

“He’s fine,” said JJ.

“Reid’s business is his own,” scolded Hotch.

And Emily began to wonder if they were ignoring him on purpose, because he was in no way acting in any semblance of what she’d call ‘fine’.

This continued until the day Hotch failed to arrive at work.

 

Emily volunteered to go to Hotch’s apartment to find him, but she was surprised when Reid announced he was coming with her. The drive there was silent, Reid saying nothing as he toyed with his cane across his lap and, occasionally, attempting to contact Hotch.

“You’ve been quiet,” Emily said finally, the silence grating on her. “Something you want to talk about?”

“Not really.”

Emily _hmmed_ over that. “Are you sure? Because you seem…”

He looked at her.

“…Scared.”

“Aren’t we all?” he responded, tilting his head and studying her with those changeable eyes. Outside, the weather was fluctuating. It would be winter soon. “We’ve all been on edge lately. How is my behaviour any more worrying than Hotch’s, or your own?”

“Because you twitch like _you’re_ the one hunted,” she retorted. “Come on, Reid. Don’t make me profile you. We’ve all known you, how long now? But we know nothing about you. Nothing about your family, your life, your home, your interests. I don’t know you any better now than I did the night I found you in the snow.”

He glanced at her, seemingly surprised. “You remember that?”

“Of course I remember that. How could I forget? It’s the only time I’ve really seen you _happy.”_

Clearly discomforted by this, he looked back down at his lap and traced his nails over the cane as though following a memorised pattern.

“And yet,” she mused out loud, turning down Hotch’s street and slowly idling while waiting to turn into the parking area of his building, “I still feel like I know you better than anyone else on the team, like… like there’s something about you that’s… familiar?”

“I—” he began as they stepped out of the car, but trailed off. She followed his gaze up the side of the building, seeing something dark flicker against the window of a floor several stories above.

“What was that?” she said, shaking her head in case she’d imagined it or it was a trick of the light.

But Reid didn’t say anything, just ran.

She followed.

 

After, she’d doubt that she’d really seen what she’d seen. Reid yelled at her to get Hotch’s door open. Since he sounded truly terrified, she did. Morgan would have been proud.

They burst into the apartment, Emily skidding on a smear of still-wet blood, and Foyet was standing there. Hotch lay below him, unmoving. Bleeding.

Foyet smiled.

His eyes, Emily noted, were black.

“Hello, Jack,” Foyet said quietly, staring right at Reid. “I’ve been looking for you.”

“I’m not Jack,” Reid responded. His voice was thin, shaken. Scared beyond reason. Emily gripped her gun tighter and aimed it steadily. Reid wasn’t even holding his. “Get away from him, now. He has nothing to do with us.”

“I think,” Foyet said in a voice that felt to Emily as though it had crawled out of one of her nightmares, “he absolutely does. When will you understand that we are meant to be _together?_ You can’t hide from what you are forever, look what it’s doing to you. Making you _weak.”_

And he lurched towards them. Emily fired.

The world turned black, the darkness roiling around them as a deep black that choked her when she gasped for air, hearing Reid cry out with fear. It was in her mouth, her nose, and she spat and spat but it still coated her tongue in a sandy mass that bit and burned.

She was dying. It seemed inescapable. The fear of it crushed her.

But there was a bright snap of light, a crackling sound like glass shattering, and light returned to the world. Emily was on the ground, her gun gone and Hotch still motionless, but the black had faded.

She turned fast, reeling around and finding Reid standing there alone, his cane gripped in both hands and breathing hard. For a split second, just the time between a blink, she’d swear she saw his eyes meet hers, blue all the way through and his wild hair as white as the fallen snow.

The blink was over and she looked again, seeing nothing but hazel and brown.

“Call an ambulance,” he said, striding past her to attend to Hotch. “Now, Emily!”

She did, but not before noting that the ground she was kneeling on was slicked over with a thin layer of frost that vanished even as she watched, leaving nothing behind but the faintest scent of winter and the memory of a fading chill.

 


	2. Memories, Please Don't Haunt Me

Hotch lived, although Emily wondered whether he regretted that. The man that emerged from Foyet’s knife was sharper, colder, more reckless. Angry at himself and angry at the world, as his family were taken from him for their own protection and vanished into the grip of WITSEC. None of them spoke about what they’d seen that day, the nightmarishly black smoke that had tried to kill them or the way Foyet’s eyes had shone without colour, but Emily remembered.

The very fact that Reid wouldn’t talk about it made her wonder.

She waited until he wasn’t at work one day before looking up his employee file and finding nothing. Not just nothing of interest, but nothing at _all._ Special Agent Spencer Reid did not exist in the Bureau’s archives. He had no employee number, no file, no records. His name brought up nothing at all.

Stunned, she closed her computer down, sat for a while in the quiet bullpen, and considered her next move. There seemed no point in asking the team; they didn’t seem to realise there was anything about him that was odd, as though he could…

Hide his weirdness from them.

But she’d lived her life surrounded by weird. There was no hiding from her.

Emily reached for her keys, leaving without a word to the others as she decided where to go next.

 

After some accidental sleuthing over Reid’s shoulder the year before when he’d been reluctantly talked into signing up for a charity raffle, Emily knew his address. She’d never been there before tonight, finding herself in an unfamiliar neighbourhood with her cell switched off at her hip to forestall anyone trying to summon her away.

She needed to know. Not knowing was burning, chewing small bits out of her until there was nothing left but wondering. And it was a frightening prospect, invading his privacy like this, but so was the crawling notion that Foyet was going to go after Reid just like he’d gone after Hotch.

It took an alarmingly small amount of sweet-talking to get the building manager to let Emily into Reid’s apartment, Emily making a mental note to speak to Reid about increasing his security once this was all over. But for now, she took advantage of it; she refused to find herself too late to save a co-worker from a monster once more, even if that co-worker was hiding something big from her. Here she was, waiting for the building manager to walk away and turn the corner until she pushed on the unlocked door of his apartment and slipped in.

It was both exactly what she’d expected and also nothing like it at all.

There was very little furniture in the apartment. The space echoed as she walked slowly in, the closing of the door resonating as though to compound her guilt. The furniture that was there seemed optimised for comfort over utility: a half-sunken in sofa shoved against one wall, three beanbags all varying levels of buried under books and papers, and rickety bookshelves lined with yet more books and a curious assortment of what looked like children’s toys. Emily found herself staring at them, astounded. She’d never pegged Reid as the kind of guy to keep a broken toy train, or a selection of plastic dinosaurs that were faded from the sun, or a puzzle box with half the box missing. The books were the only things in the room that appeared to have had money spent on them. Everything else looked like… well, it looked like he’d found it. There were no electronics either, not that that surprised Emily: in fact, the only thing here that seemed to pull power was the truly incredible number of lamps stacked on every surface and propped in every corner. Every one of them was on, despite the daylight outside.

And there were no photos, no framed degrees. Nothing. Emily looked around the walls and found them bare. When she dodged the untidy piles of books to duck into the next room, she found more to ponder: the kitchen, but there was nothing in here to suggest it was ever used. There was no fridge. Inside the pantry, there was nothing inside except an open packet of peanuts with a single startled mouse skittering out of them and down into a hole at the back. In the kitchen, much the same as the living room, lamps lined every counter.

Now thoroughly confused, Emily moved down a lamp-lined hallway to the only other rooms in the apartment: a bathroom, which was untouched but oddly cold to the touch; what should have been a bedroom but instead, in this strange place, appeared to be storage for an even more eclectic assortment of damaged toys and no bed; and an office.

The office, unlike every other room, actually looked like an adult lived and worked here. The lamps were just as present as every other room, but the desk was in some semblance of order and the bookshelves seemed purposeful instead of miscellaneous. Upon that desk, Emily found neatly sorted piles of newspaper clippings and handwritten notes from what seemed to be encyclopedia and internet archive entries.

Instinct guided her. They’d found too many Unsubs with their entire lives laid out in their collections of newspaper clippings to discount the fact that people just seemed inclined to display their backstories. Maybe out of a desire to understand themselves, but it also made Emily’s job far easier. She appreciated it for that, even if the idea of exposing so much of herself was anathema to her.

And it didn’t take long to find the one clipping he’d returned to over and over and over again, mostly because even though it didn’t stand out at first glance, on the second… on the second, she recognised it. Recognised the photo, anyway, because she’d spent her entire life in the shadow of that moment.

There it was: an image of a small girl with dark, dark hair being carried from a snowbound forest wrapped in the jacket Emily still had folded neatly in the bottom of her closet. For the first time since that day, Emily picked up that picture with shaking hands and found the headline attached.

GIRL RESCUED, BOY DIES, IN SAVAGE BLIZZARD THAT STRANDED THIRTY

There were no names in the article. Emily read it four times, finding no identifying features in the story at all, not anything she recognised. She didn’t remember a boy. She didn’t remember the trip she’d apparently been on with twenty-eight other students from various accelerated programs around the country. She didn’t remember a blizzard. She didn’t remember this: that apparently the girl pictured— _her_ —and another boy had slipped away from their school bus and out into the blizzard.

The boy had died in the snow. She hadn’t.

Emily shuffled faster through the clippings, searching frantically for any name, _anything_ , to tell her more about what had happened. Surmounting everything, a terrible fear: had she lured that boy from the safety of the bus on one of her ridiculous childhood rebellions against authority?

Had she been responsible for his death?

And there, there it was… she stopped and stared at what she’d found, tucked right to the back of all the others as though it was important enough to be categorised with the rest… but not in a way where the person categorising it wanted to see it without warning. That was understandable, as Emily read it and realised what it contained. There was a name, for sure. That was definitely a name.

It was a funeral announcement for a boy named Spencer Reid. Born on the twenty-eighth of October 1971. Died on the eighth of January 1984, aged thirteen, in the same blizzard that had tried and failed to kill her.

The photo on the announcement was him in the same jacket she’d been wearing. And she didn’t know him like this, this young and smiling at the camera with his face so hopeful, but there was absolutely no doubt in her mind that the boy pictured in grainy newspaper print would have grown into the man that worked on the desk beside hers, had he been given the chance.

But that was impossible.

A cold wind whipped through the room, tearing the newspapers from the desk and flurrying them around in a frantic eddy in the centre of the room. Emily turned.

“You shouldn’t be in here,” said Spencer. He was watching her with his expression ghastly, a fraught kind of pallid and his cane clutched tight in shaking hands. He looked… horrified. Utterly horrified. The wind seemed to ignore him, pulling at everything in the room except the small sphere of calm around his shock and dismay.

“You’re dead,” she whispered, closing her eyes and remembering, suddenly, cold hands in hers. “You died. I remember you… I remember you died.”

“You’re mistaken,” said he, shaking his head furiously. “Emily, listen to yourself—how can I be dead? I’m _here?”_

But his shrill voice betrayed him. She didn’t need to be a profiler to know he was scared all the way through, scared of her and what she might have discovered snooping where she wasn’t welcome.

“I have coat in my closet, a jacket with a dinosaur on it,” she said forcefully, encroaching on that space as the wind kept whipping at her, seeming to grow with his fear. “And your initials on it. I was found, wearing that coat. _Your_ coat. You have the articles. Either you’re that boy, or you’re his identical twin with the same name—what am I supposed to believe, Spencer? And this apartment? This apartment isn’t lived in, this isn’t where a person exists. There’s no food? No bedding?”

“Emily, stop,” he breathed.

“Did I kill you?” she gasped out, the horror of that statement slamming home. She’d always been an idiot child, always. Getting into trouble and dragging her friends into it too—just like Matthew. Oh god, _just_ like Matthew.

“No,” he said. She didn’t believe him.

“Maybe not on purpose, but you followed me out into that blizzard, didn’t you? We could have been safe in the bus, but I slipped out and you followed and you _died_. Didn’t you? I’m not crazy, am I? Answer me, Reid!”

The lamps flickered, the wind messing with them. Around his tightened hands, Emily could see frost building on the cane, tendrils of ice spinning around the wood in delicate patterns she couldn’t quite make out the specifics of. For a split second, the lights were out and the shadows seemed deeper, more dangerous, the room growing icy and something cold beginning to trace down Emily’s spine.

In that moment, he gasped and shrunk back, pure terror lining his face. Not of her though, she didn’t think… but of those shadows. The flickering dark.

She remembered the dark. He’d died in the dark, the dark she’d led him into.

“What are you?” she asked.

The lights went out.

For the briefest of heartbeats—the second between one blink and the next—the room snapped into darkness despite the sun outside and, in that second, where Reid had been standing, she saw a terrified child. Small and slim with the cane in hand now long staff of knobby wood instead with a peculiarly hooked end. His hair was white instead of brown; his eyes blue instead of hazel; and, most astoundingly, she _knew_ him, despite all the differences.

And then she saw the shape behind him.

“Reid!” she cried, her gun in her hands before she’d thought it through. “Get down!”

He whirled around, adult to her eyes again and moving with obscene speed across to the other side of the room in what seemed like one effortless bound, his feet barely touching the floor.

No, she realised, looking away from that lurking shape as her brain glitched over that leap: his feet _weren’t_ touching the floor. But there was no time for her to focus on that impossibility, because Foyet leaned into the room and smiled at them both.

“Boo,” he said. “Did you really think _those_ could stop me, Jack?”

He pointed to one of the lamps, the bulb within shattering with a pop and cascade of glass shards. Emily stared as he repeated the gesture again at another, and another, and another, until every bulb was shattered and the air glimmered with the settling residue of the glass.

The room was icy cold and no one spoke.

“There, isn’t that better?” said Foyet. As he stepped into the room, the carpet crunched below his shoes. “Nice and properly… frightening.”

“We’re not scared of you,” Emily said coldly, her gun unwavering.

Foyet stopped, raising one eyebrow and smiling. The smile was obscene. It seemed deeper than it should be, the shadows on his face collecting in the lines of his skin and making every expression garish. It felt like midnight, despite being barely past noon.

“You aren’t,” said Foyet eventually, nodding at her with that same midnight smile. “But… oh, he is. He really, really is. Can’t you _smell_ it?”

Emily didn’t want to turn her back on this man, not after what he’d done to Hotch, but Reid wasn’t making a sound behind her and she was wary of him right now. So, she looked.

And she regretted looking.

He was slunk up against the wall with every part of his body knotted tight, his fingers buckled against that wall and his cane at his feet. She could see every inch of white around his staring eyes, nostrils flaring as he struggled to breathe around an utterly consuming fear she could tell was crushing the lungs in his tightening chest.

“I told you, Jack,” whispered Foyet, dodging her and leaning towards him. Her finger itched to fire, but they were in a residential apartment with no guarantee against her bullet going wide into a wall and, at the same time, her finger wouldn’t obey her. “I can help with that… the fear. You’ve spent thirteen years trying to outrun who you’re meant to be, your _purpose._ Why do you think the fear is so overwhelming? It’s a part of you, a glorious, encompassing part of you. Your _centre._ And it’s why you can’t outrun me… because I _am_ you, and I’ll always follow your fear.”

“I’m not Jack,” wheezed Reid out of his barely open lips. “I told you that night that I’m not Jack, and I won’t become like you.”

“You won’t be _strong?”_ hissed Foyet, his shape twisting and, for a moment, as though there was another being superimposed under his slighter frame. Something taller and lankier, with the kind of darkened eyes and spindly fingers Emily had only ever expected to find as a child, skittering out from under her bed.

“I won’t be a nightmare,” said Reid. It was the first time he’d sounded sure. Suddenly, in the face of that, Emily could move again… and she did. Neither of them were paying attention to her, as she sidled around Foyet and slid her gun more firmly into her hands, ready to bring the butt down on the back of the man’s skull.

“Pity,” said Foyet coldly. “I always did think that _he_ chose the wrong one last night. Don’t you think so, Emily?”

Emily froze, gun raised and in a precariously open position as Foyet turned and smiled at her.

“Don’t!” cried Reid, lunging to grab his cane and raising it high. Emily caught a glimpse of a great icy light sparking into life above him, some tremendous storm localised within this very room—and then Foyet grabbed her arm and yanked her with him as he flung himself to the ground to avoid Reid’s blow. She expected to hit the floor but found nothing there, tumbling down and down and down as though there was nothing below her except an endless void of darkness and cold.

And then she hit the ground and knew nothing at all.

 

When she blinked awake, it was snowing heavily. She struggled up, her early-November clothes nowhere near warm enough for the thick gusts of winter-dry air slamming into her from the north. The snow was falling hard enough to weigh her down in seconds, frantically trying to walk with the wind in a desperate attempt to get out this cold. It was so dark, so frozen, she couldn’t even see her hands when she raised them.

“Reid!” she cried.

He didn’t answer.

There was a light ahead. It flickered against the snow and she ran towards it, pushing through the snow beginning to bank up. Her boots slipped and skidded on the ice that was deceptively buried beneath the fresh snowfall and she almost tumbled into a waist-high fence that knocked the air out of her stomach. But the light was closer and, as she climbed that fence and pushed nearer still, she found that the source of those two blinking eyes in the darkness was the precariously pitched bus half-embedded in a ditch beside the rapidly disappearing highway. She could see the vaguest suggestion of people moving inside the frosted windows, the lights within the bus chugging on with the headlights as the motor tried and failed to catch, over and over again. Emily fought her way to the door, raising her hand to knock.

It slipped open before her hand could strike it and she found herself watching as a small boy slid out the barely-there gap, turning sideways to make it. The door fought him. It hadn’t been mechanically opened, just forced by his little hands, and she realised that the bus was years out of date, as were the clothes he was wearing. Woollen gloves and hat of tan and orange, wearing a heavy coat with a dinosaur on the back, and she caught a glimpse of his wide eyes behind thick glasses as he landed in the snow and almost vanished, falling into it. When he reappeared, he looked around, fear clear in his expression as he realised how dark it was.

“Get back in the bus,” Emily cried, grabbing for him. “What are you doing, you’ll die out here!”

But he ran right through her like she wasn’t even there, Emily gasping and pressing her hands to her stomach that he’d passed right through.

The shock of that kept her there, until a sound muffled by the growing blizzard snapped her out of it. The door of the bus went again—wider this time as a girl leapt out fearlessly: a girl with dark hair and dark eyes and a cocky smile as she looked around and then focused on his already fading footprints in the snow. Emily, as the door slowly closed behind her younger self, saw more small faces staring out fearfully, some of them clustered around a buckled figure who lay, unmoving, over the steering wheel.

“Emily, come back!” cried a voice from within the bus. “You’ll never find him! It’s dark!”

“I’m not scared of the dark,” said the smaller Emily proudly, marching right past her older self as she followed the smaller boy into the storm. “We’ll be back with help!”

Emily didn’t want to follow them. She knew how it ended, even if she hadn’t remembered exactly how it had started: with this broken-down bus that she now remembered had been like an ice-box once the heater had stopped working, and with their driver sick from something she hadn’t been old enough to understand. He’d just collapsed, leaving Emily and Spencer and twenty-seven other kids alone.

“Come on then,” said Foyet, stepping out of the darkness as though his body was composed of it and offering her his hand. “Don’t you want to see what you could have been?”

“No,” said Emily honestly, but Foyet sighed and rolled his eyes. Again, Emily saw that gruesome shape within him.

“Fine,” said Foyet, snapping his fingers.

The bus vanished. The darkness returned, broken by a light by her shoulder that gleamed weakly inside a glass case. She pressed her fingers to the frozen surface, rubbing the frost aside and finding that it was an emergency phone perched on the windswept edge of this lonely highway. Nothing for miles but more dark, more snow, and the phone was hanging out of its cradle, suspended by its cord.

Emily looked at that for a while. Around her, the blizzard stopped as suddenly as if someone had flicked a switch, but Emily knew that that hadn’t been what had happened that night. It had gotten worse.

They’d found the phone, called for help, and then it had gotten worse.

Emily turned to run back to the bus—she knew innately which way it was—but then stopped. Because, they hadn’t gone that way, had they?

“Sometimes,” whispered Foyet’s voice around her, all around her, “it’s very clever to be afraid of the dark.”

In that deathly, lying silence, Emily turned and walked the other way from safety. Down the slope behind the phone, the one that was too steep to climb back up with all that ice frozen down it. The one that, with the blizzard paused, she could see the trail leading down in a wobbly, chaotic line. Lost and confused.

She followed that trail until she found the end.

As she stepped over the fence they’d tried to huddle against, the darkness faded around her for just a moment. A full moon broke overhead, looking down upon this scene. Shining a grim light upon it.

Emily walked until she couldn’t, numb from the cold and numb inside too as she crouched beside the two small figures curled so close together they almost looked like they’d been sculpted there as an example of how picturesque childhood could be. With white cheeks carved from marble and sculpted-closed eyelids of a faded blue, the lashes lined with ice and lips so perfectly shaped in purple stone, Emily found the two children looking so dangerously formed out here in the snow and knew they were dead. The both of them. Her with her black hair torn wildly by the wind and frozen into those jagged spikes, and him with his glasses gone and his jacket atop her. They held hands, the branch that she knew they’d been using to try to navigate through the snow to avoid falling into drifts laying abandoned at Spencer’s knee. It was knobby and hooked oddly at the end.

“He gave me his coat,” Emily said numbly, looking at his uncovered arms that were wrapped tight around her and seeing, in the moonlight, the slightest lift of her chest. “I didn’t kill him, but he still died because of me.”

Foyet didn’t answer. Emily turned fast, finding herself alone in the moonlight.

He was gone.

But she wasn’t alone.

When she turned again, she found that there was a boy crouched beside them, his eyes shocked wide as he looked down at himself. One of his hands was leaning on the knee of the dead boy; the other reached out almost by itself to curl around the branch, which crackled gently under his fingers as though coming to life.

His hair was white and, when he looked around wildly, she saw his blue, blue eyes.

“Spencer,” she breathed, stunned, as he stumbled up and back into the snow. But he didn’t fall into the drift like she—and he—expected. His bare toes pressed onto the snow… and held. He stood upon it as though he had no weight at all, looking down as though he didn’t know what was going on either.

But his body was still there, and hers soon too.

“I don’t understand,” he said, looking up and speaking to someone above him. She looked up too, but there was no one there but the moon. “Why me?”

But there was no answer.

“No,” said Spencer, his eyes narrowing behind their glasses. She saw a shade of ferocity there, something that he certainly didn’t have now, even in the guise of his adult form. “Not her too. That’s not _fair.”_

Silence. If something replied, she didn’t hear it.

Spencer, apparently, did.

“I’d rather be afraid,” he said quietly, crouching and reaching the staff out to press to the snow beside them. Emily watched, stunned, as the snow leapt back, repelled by that staff’s tip. And it kept receding, as he walked in a circle around them and drew a line between her and that creeping cold, leaving the two children curled on the clear ground. Spencer, the ghostly Spencer who she could now tell was as much a part of the winter that had killed him as the wind was, raised his staff with a thin, worried yell and closed his eyes, the same tremendous storm building above him and sending sparks of icy blue and white to light up the storm above. No one looking would have seen it as a natural light show. No one could.

And, when lights appeared—flashlights, she realised, summoned by those curious lights in the storm—Spencer glanced up once at the now moonless sky, nodded, and vanished back into the dark as men appeared to scoop her from the clear ground she lay upon.

Emily swore, trying to chase that ghostly figure, but he was gone and she tripped—

 

—and woke under a swollen moon, staring up at it from the ground where she, in the present once more, lay. It was the courtyard outside her apartment. She had no idea how no one had seen her lying here and panicked, struggling up as her entire body ached from being in the cold for however long since she’d been dumped there. And her cell-phone in her pocket was going wild, missed calls and texts from her co-workers after she hadn’t returned from work. It only took opening one to realise how much trouble they were in: Reid hadn’t returned either.

“Fuck,” said Emily, wondering how the hell she was going to explain this madness to Hotch when she barely understood it herself. Everyone was, as she expected, all still at work where they’d been since both her and Reid had vanished into the afternoon. She told them as much as she could—that Foyet had attacked, that she’d been overwhelmed and woke up at her apartment hours later, and that was fine but she didn’t know where Reid was.

And, despite hoping that he’d return so she could ask him what the hell the night Foyet had shown her had been about, that didn’t change.

Reid didn’t return.


	3. Darkness, Come and Find Me

The winter was bitter that year. It was the hardest winter Emily had lived through since the blizzard when she was thirteen, with even DC buried under a vicious amount of snow. If there had ever been anything kind and gentle about the winter, it wasn’t here. People died. And, still, no one knew where Spencer was. There was no ongoing investigation. The team had tried to open one but, just as Emily had found, Spencer Reid didn’t exist. To the people around them, the memory of their odd team member faded faster than the snow. Before long, it seemed as though—to anyone but them—their team had always only been six.

But they remembered. Emily remembered. Morgan remembered. Hotch and JJ remembered.

They all remembered, and missed him ferociously.

“What happened that day?” JJ asked Emily one night on the jet ride home, every one of them pretending that they weren’t staring at the empty seat that, according to the Bureau, had never been filled. “You know… when he…?”

Emily shook her head. How could she possibly explain what she’d seen? A vision or a memory, it didn’t matter. It was something _impossible_ , but not quite as impossible as a man who’d vanished from their world as though he was doing his best to never exist, as though…

She glanced to the window. Outside, the world was dark.

She wondered where he was.

“I don’t know,” she finally answered. “I honestly just don’t know.”

Hotch, who was still scarred inside and out from the damage the nightmarish Foyet had done to him, sat silently and said nothing.

 

It was snowing when she arrived home, sitting in her car for a while in the parking area of her building watching the windows slowly turn white under a dusting of white-grey flakes. None of the usual slushy mess of DC winter, this fall was fast and intent, the sky above heavy and dark. Even as she sat there, feeling drained all the way through from their work and her worry about Reid and drowning under how useless she felt in the face of his disappearance, the snow quickened. It was now or never to shuffle her way inside, before she fell asleep out here and froze. The same clawing childhood anxiety of the winter around her began to sink into her brain, reminding her how deadly even the most beautiful of nights could be. Despite the clouds covering the moon’s eye, she felt exposed and raw. Dangerously vulnerable, as though the winter itself could reach into her car and drag her out and into the depths of it as easily as Foyet had dragged her into a memory.

She shoved her door open, leaving her handbag and keys in the car as some frivolous determination took over her. The anxiety frustrated her; she refused to be frightened anymore. Fear, after all, was what had frozen Reid when she’d needed him to be beside her—it was the reason he wasn’t beside her _now,_ but instead out somewhere alone and scared—

How did she know he was scared?

Emily shook that thought aside. She just _knew._ Innately, as though it was a part of her or someone had whispered it secretly into her ear and she’d realised it was true. And that was why she walked out calmly into the flurrying snow, standing in the middle of the parking lot shivering as it heaped on her shoulders and hair. It took every inch of her courage to tip her head back and stare up into the sky, remembering how he’d looked that night as she reached up, up, up…

Cold air touched her bared fingers, but that was it. No playful wind teased at her. It was now, in the parking lot of her building standing lonely in the snow that she realised how kind the winter had always been to her following that blizzard: how teasing the winds and how giddy the snow and how joyous the frost. Everything she’d ever known about winter following that night, everything she’d resented, she now realised hadn’t been the winter at all.

“It was always you, wasn’t it?” she asked him. “You were always there, weren’t you?  All those snow days, those beautiful snowfalls that seemed just for me… it was you. I just never saw you…”

“You didn’t believe in me,” Reid said from behind her. Emily almost tumbled into the snow with surprise, staggering around and finding him standing there barefoot and with his shoulders slumped, cane in hand.

He stood atop the snow.

“That doesn’t make sense,” she said, shaking her head. “You made everyone at work see you—you _worked_ with them. Belief had nothing to do with it?”

He gave her an odd look, tilting his head like a bird. “They saw what they expected to see. Is it so hard to believe in something that beggars no disbelief? Even now, Em… you see me how you think I am, don’t you? You see what you _believe,_ not what I am… you see who you’re comfortable with.:

Emily watched him, narrowing her eyes against the wind that always seemed to follow wherever he went. He wasn’t wrong. She expected, despite having seen that memory, an adult… because that was what children did, wasn’t it?

They grew up.

Emily, even though it frightened her beyond belief to turn her back on the dark and the snow, closed her eyes and walked forward bravely, hand outstretched. Her eyes, expecting something, were lying to her. Her hands, which remembered how cold his fingers had been wrapped around hers, expected nothing of the sort. And she stopped when she sensed that he was before her, kneeling down in the snow despite her wet knees and reaching out carefully for him.

He took her hand. His fingers around hers were small and fragile, and cold as a winter’s bite. With her other hand, she reached to where a child’s head would reach before her… finding a cheek that was far more rounded than his adult counterpart and curling her thumb down over a jaw that was nowhere near as defined.

She opened her eyes, and she saw him.

“Oh,” she said quietly, holding the hand of this ghostly child who lived and breathed the snow around them. “Oh. You really are…”

Dead, she was going to say, but the word choked her.

“Here,” he said in his little voice, smiling a little warily at her. Just as shy and nervous when he was small in her memory… except, that wasn’t right, was it? A child as terrified of the world as he’d been as an adult, that child wouldn’t have left the safety of the bus in an attempt to save the others trapped there too: that child would have waited to be saved. But he hadn’t. He’d braved the storm and the dark. He _was_ different.

“He’s going to find me,” Spencer said worriedly, turning around and staring nervously at every dark corner with his grip tightening in hers, the wind around his shoulders picking up faster and snarling protectively. “He always finds me. I thought if I made myself bigger and hid among you guys… I thought he wouldn’t recognise me. Plus it was so _fun,_ being alive and learning—I really do have all my degrees, you know. I didn’t make those up, I enrolled myself in college and studied and I wasn’t scared at all because he didn’t find me there and it was thrilling. But he always shows up, eventually, ever since the moon woke me. I’m putting you in danger being here, I should run away from you and away from the others, so he doesn’t hurt anyone I love.”

“What is he?” she asked. She was beginning to shake tremendously from the cold, and he noticed.

“I can’t help warm you,” he apologised. “All I can do is make it colder. And you know what he is. You told me he’d come for me, all those years ago. Don’t you remember warning me?”

She didn’t and shook her head to say so.

“You said,” whispered Spencer as though it was a great secret, “‘You should hold my hand in the dark, Spencer, because otherwise the Bogeyman will get you’. But I let go, and he got me.” He shook his head sadly, shrugging his shoulders up and sighing. “I’m sorry. I should have listened. You weren’t scared of him at all.”

Emily’s heart ached for him. “Come on,” she said quietly. “Come inside, out of the cold. You like chocolate, right?”

“Oh, very much,” he said, beaming. Together, hand in hand, she led him out of the snow, just as she wished she had all those years ago.

 

She gave him chocolate milk and sat him on her couch, sitting beside him and wondering what to say. In the end, she stuck with what was pertinent, even though it felt indescribably strange to discuss work with a thirteen-year-old boy with a milky brown moustache across his top lip as he tried to slurp the marshmallows out before the foam.

“You think Foyet is the Bogeyman?” she asked first, amused by this.

But Spencer didn’t look amused at all. “Of course. Just like you warned me—he came out of the dark that night, right after I ran away from you. I was scared and alone and suddenly he appeared and told me not to listen to the moon anymore, and to listen to him instead because he could… he could…”

He swallowed, the mug trembling in his hands.

“Help you?” Emily asked.

Spencer nodded.

“Well, I don’t think he’s the Bogeyman,” Emily said resolutely. “That’s a story.”

“A story like Jack Frost?” Spencer said. “A story like a boy who controls the frost and snow? He exists, you know. Jack. I’m not him, but he exists. But the moon needed me too and… well, here I am. And if you believe in me, you have to believe in him too.”

Emily thought about that for a while.

“Maybe he’s like you,” she said finally. “He died and something brought him back…”

But Spencer shook his head some more. “The moon doesn’t want him,” he said with surety. “He was made because there was a gap, a void in the world. Same reason I was—he was born with a _purpose_ , but not intentionally. I think…” He paused, seeming to second guess whatever he’d been about to say. “I think… he was created because someone else wasn’t, and that’s why he wants me so much. Because I’m one half of something important and he’s my other half.”

“How is a _murderer_ your other half?” Emily spluttered, nonplussed. Out of all the insanity she’d heard since that night, this was the wildest. How could anyone look at this kid with his bare feet and staff and chocolatey mouth and think he could be paired with a… a nightmare?

“Because I’m afraid all the time,” he answered. “And he feeds on it.”

There wasn’t much Emily could say to this.

“So how do we stop you from being afraid?” she finally asked.

“We can’t,” was Spencer’s reply. “I left my courage behind a long time ago, and there’s no getting it back now. Besides, even if I could… I wouldn’t.”

He looked away, his next words so quiet she wasn’t even sure she’d heard them at all.

“I think I like my courage better how she is without me.”

Emily wondered about that.

 

When she woke the next day on her couch, a quick glance into her bedroom confirmed that her bed—which she’d stuck him in the night before and told him to _sleep_ in—was empty and the covers untouched. The only sign that he’d ever been there at all was a finely shaped bird made of crystalline ice set neatly by her bedside cupboard, and the still-lingering chill of the room.

“You better come back to us,” she told the ice-bird firmly, just in case he was lingering in the frost on the windows listening in on her. “You don’t get to do that, Spencer—you don’t get to magic yourself into our lives, make us love you, and then f… vanish. That’s not fair.”

But if he was there, he gave no indication.

Glumly, she went on with her life just as he intended: without him in it.

 

When it came to an end, it came to a climactic one. They all knew that Foyet was still out there, and that whatever he was it certainly wasn’t human anymore. While Emily scoffed at Spencer’s childish term for him, it did fit. He seemed like the kind of being that lurked in every shadow, under every bed, and Hotch grew grimmer and grimmer as winter crawled on and there was no sign of him. Emily wondered how he could stand it, knowing his family was a target… and then she knew that if her feelings around Spencer were any indication, she absolutely couldn’t.

“I think that’s why he ran,” Emily realised out loud one night, as they were flying home from a particularly gruelling case. The turbulence on this flight was rough, the jet shuddering and the seatbelt sign permanently on. Everyone was white-knuckled and green-tinged, except Morgan who was curled up pretending—badly—to sleep. When Emily had spoken, his eyes had opened just a line, watching her carefully. She clarified: “Spencer—I think that’s why he ran. He’s strongest in winter. Maybe he’s using that to lead Foyet away from Haley and Jack. I don’t think Foyet is _Foyet_ anymore, but he’s after Spencer, right? And targeting you has worked every time to draw Spencer to him.”

“Emily,” said Hotch, staring intently at her with his expression all kinds of ‘I am concerned’. Emily scowled in preparation. “You know how unlikely all of this is, don’t you?”

“Insane,” corrected Morgan, sitting upright as the jet rumbled over another pocket. “He means insane. Winter sprites and nightmares? The _Bogeyman?_ That’s nuts, it’s so fucking nuts. If it wasn’t so weird how Reid just vanished, you know we’d think you were insane, right?”

“Morgan,” JJ chided gently.

“I didn’t call him the Bogeyman,” Emily said, affronted. “That was Spencer. I told you, he’s a _child_. That’s a child’s notion of fear.”

“He’s a twenty-six-year-old man,” Morgan snapped back. “Come on, Emily! You gotta meet us halfway here, we’re trying—”

“Reid,” said Hotch, jolting in his seat.

“Yeah, Reid,” Morgan said, thrown. “Like I was saying, he—”

But Emily had seen what Hotch had: “Spencer,” she breathed, going to unbuckle her seatbelt as the boy inched out of the curtained kitchenette, eyes huge and staff in hand. “How the fuck did you get here?”

The others all turned to follow Hotch and Emily’s gazes.

“They don’t believe I’m here, except Hotch,” said Spencer quietly as the others expressed their confusion to the stunned Emily and Hotch. “He believes. He’s always believed, although he still sees me as an adult, don’t you, Aaron?”

Hotch just stared, his own hand on his seatbelt and his mouth partially open as though holding back a startled cry.

“Why are you here?” Emily tried, since he didn’t seem inclined to answer her first question.

“I lost him,” Spencer said. He was still watching Hotch, his grip tight on his staff. Emily didn’t like that look on his face: it was a look that suggested he had terrible, terrible news. “I was trying to keep him away from you all, but I think he realised what I was doing and slipped away… and I think I know where he’s going. Aaron, where are your family?”

Silence. Hotch, as Emily watched, went grey.

“I think maybe he knows,” Spencer finished in a small, scared voice as he pressed himself back into the wall. Emily unbuckled her seatbelt finally, striding over there and crouching beside him, touching those small, tense fingers as she tried to coax him to calm down. He wouldn’t be coaxed. “But if you tell me where they are, I can… I can…” He swallowed, utterly terrified by this. “I can…”

But it didn’t seem like he could.

“I don’t know where they are,” Hotch said, standing too. The jet shook, Emily bracing herself with a hand on the floor and the seatbelt light blinking stubbornly. “I’m not allowed to know, for their own safety. Are you sure he’s gone after them?”

“I found this,” said Spencer, reaching into his pocket and bringing forth Hotch’s lost FBI credentials, stolen so long ago when Foyet had knifed him. “In the place where I was hiding, just sitting there.”

“No,” breathed Hotch. The message seemed irrefutably clear: he was next or, if he proved unavailable, his family was.

“Oh my god,” said JJ suddenly, jerking against her seatbelt. “Spence?”

Spencer smiled slightly at her. “Guess it’s easier to believe I’m real than that Hotch is talking to thin air,” he said with that same half-terrified smile.

Emily was a little hurt by that, although she understood.

“I can’t stay,” Spencer explained, stepping back warily. “I’m sorry, I thought… I thought I could offer to go and help them, but if he’s there—you don’t understand, Aaron, I don’t know how to be that brave.”

“But you’ve been braver before,” Emily reminded him furiously, seeing his form flicker and fade into the very suggestion of snow, like he was about to melt away right there and cease to be. “Hankel? You were brave then.”

“I had JJ with me,” argued Spencer.

“The bus?” Emily countered. “You went out into the dark alone then.”

“And I _died!”_ Spencer cried back. “Every time I’ve been brave, it’s because someone was there making me be—I can’t go there alone, I _can’t._ I’m not that strong. You’ll have to fly fast and get there first, Aaron, and I really, really hope you do. If something happens to them…” He closed his eyes, expression haunted. “I’m sorry. I wish I could he—”

The jet jolted hard. For a second, Emily felt weightless; moments later, she realised that that was because the jet had dropped quite suddenly. Before she’d even hit the floor again, she realised that it was still dropping.

Everyone screamed, everyone. Even Hotch, who’d been thrown into the air much as she had and come down just as hard. With a click and a whoop from a siren somewhere, oxygen masks dropped.

A small hand grabbed Emily, dragging her with more strength than she’d have guessed he possessed to the closest chair. “Seatbelt,” he said firmly. “And oxygen, quick. He’s found me—I have to run or he’ll bring a storm down on us.”

Emily, distantly, realised that both Morgan and Rossi were looking at Spencer now, grimly amused that in the face of disaster they’d suddenly believed—probably because her arm had yanked up and dragged her bizarrely into her chair and, as she buckled back in with trembling fingers, Spencer leapt the scattered mugs rolling in the aisle and did the same to Hotch.

“If he’s here, then he’s not—” Hotch began, fighting Spencer’s hands off as he grabbed for his seatbelt and then, instead of the oxygen, his cell.

“He has creatures who help him,” Spencer argued, pointing to the mask. “ _Aaron,_ you need that! The plane is descending fast despite no viable airfields being near—that means the pilot expects depressurisation, which means you won’t be able to breathe!”

“I have to call—” Hotch began, but they never did find out who he was so determined to risk his life for, although they could all guess. They didn’t find out because, at that exact moment, something hit the side of the jet so hard that the grind of metal left all their heads ringing, Emily half-deaf just from the noise of it.

She opened her mouth, seeing Spencer stumble a little with JJ reaching out to grab his arm—and then there was a feeling that Emily barely knew how to describe. The first she knew of it was that her ears popped hard, painfully hard, and then she realised that anything not tied down was now hurtling towards them. But she couldn’t duck, because some terrible hand had forced her down into her seat and pinned her there, suddenly glad as hell for the mask as she bowed down against that shocking wind and tried to regain her senses of what was up and what was down. She couldn’t see through her tearing eyes or hear through her ringing ears—but she fought both those sensations to lift her head against that ripping wind and stare blindly at her companions. They were all similarly hanging onto their seats, most with their eyes closed and hands gripping the armrests hard—except for Rossi, who was leaning dangerously forward as he fought the wind to get Hotch’s mask onto him.

And Spencer, who didn’t seem to even notice the wind or the pressure, stood there with his staff in hand and his gaze on her. She couldn’t speak to him even if she wanted, but she tried to with her eyes. He seemed to get something from her expression, although she didn’t know if it was what she’d wanted him to.

When he looked away from her, she, with difficulty, followed his gaze, her stomach almost flipping in her gut when she realised the wind was from a blown out window towards the back of the jet, one which was seething with the same black midnight darkness that they’d seen the day Hotch was attacked, fighting itself to try and squeeze in through the slim gap left.

“Okay,” said Spencer. There was no feasible way that she could hear him speaking, not through this wind and her own damaged ears, but she heard it anyway. “Okay. I trust you. I can do this.”

If she’d had her voice, maybe she’d have screamed, _do what?,_ but she didn’t. Instead, she could only stare blankly as he twisted easily out of JJ’s grip and walked as calmly as though physics wasn’t demanding he be sucked right out that screaming hole the same as every other item that hadn’t been tied down had been. There was a burst of what she thought at first was light—moments later realising it was just ice that the flashing lights from the cabin were refracting off of—and then he was gone. Just gone, the darkness gone with him; despite how much it hurt to turn in her chair to stare, she did because… had he…?

But the wind was gone. The cabin was shockingly silent despite the jet throbbing around them, probably mostly because they were still deafened despite the calm. And, where the broken window had been, there was now a thick layer of ice sealing the gap. When Emily tried to take her mask off to yell his name, she realised that there was no easy air to breathe, her lungs screaming until she put it back on, looking around at her shell-shocked companions.

And, out of the intact window beside her when she turned to stare out at the storm, the clouds were lit by bursts of blue and white, as though a terrible battle raged out there in the sky around them.

She watched those lights unerringly all the way down.

 

They landed in a field, deplaning out into the frozen night with Emily judging that every one of them felt as wrecked as she did. JJ and Morgan sat right down, just sat there on the ground with Morgan’s arm around JJ and saying nothing. Rossi stared at the jet, the pilot standing beside him looking just as stunned, and also a little bit like he couldn’t believe they were alive. Hotch had strode away, cell in hand and was now desperately trying to find a signal.

Emily looked up at the sky. Snow was beginning to fall.

She lifted her hand, palm up, feeling a cool flake touch her hand. Then another, and another. But, when she lowered her hand to look at what was left behind, she found that the snow was tainted, the white marred by lines of darkness.

“I don’t think Spencer’s okay,” she said into that strange, shocked silence, not knowing if the others heard her or not. She supposed that they did because, when she looked up again, they were watching her.

“He jumped out a jet window,” Morgan said. “What the _fuck_ , Reid.”

But JJ had seen it too.

“Oh no,” she said, standing and staring up with Emily, at the silent sky above as the flakes turned from white to black, as though ash was falling upon them. And, by the time Hotch re-joined them to see what they had seen, the snow had slowed… and stopped completely.

“Jack’s gone,” he said.

 

They got picked up by the local PD and spent the next three hours in the precinct while Hotch frantically tried to organise a flight back to DC to join the effort to search for Jack. The rest of them lingered in tired uselessness, unable to help and all suffering the adrenaline crashes of their near miss.

Emily paced. It helped her feel better to pace, listening with half her attention to Hotch arguing about whether or not there was a blizzard rolling over them or not. The person on the phone seemed adamant; Hotch, having looked outside to where the sky was absolutely clear, was frustrated. Emily was sure that, any other day, he’d have believed her but it wasn’t any other day, and every flight in the area was grounded.

Her eyes skimmed a wall of articles. Most of them were acts of heroism by the small precinct, mostly finding missing hikers in the nearby woods. It was something to focus on though, and focus on it she did.

She saw the picture before she registered it consciously.

Emily swallowed, reaching up to trace the familiar picture, looking to the side where another local article commended the officer who’d found her that day. It was here. It was this place.

That didn’t feel like a coincidence. That felt dangerously deliberate. Predestined almost, predestined like one child dying and another living… predestined like, if Spencer was right, his death meaning that he’d stepped into some purpose he was needed for.

Suddenly, it clicked. Everything clicked.

She knew where Spencer was, and she knew that Foyet would be there too. The nightmare, the… the _Bogeyman,_ if that was what he was—it was using Foyet to achieve its ends, but that didn’t seem to be its end game. After all, it wanted Spencer. It had hinted so many times that what it wanted was Spencer’s _help,_ him agreeing to become whatever it was it wanted of him… even though, from the start, he’d rejected that possibility.

Maybe Spencer hadn’t been the one who was supposed to die that night.

“Do you have a car I can borrow?” she asked a passing deputy, who nodded as he registered the flash of her badge. “And a map of the area. Are emergency phones depicted on roadside maps?”

“Some of them,” he said, vanishing to get what she’d asked of him.

She didn’t tell the others because, if she was right, Foyet would be taking Jack there to repeat the events of the night the creature inside him had been created; Foyet was trying to recreate Spencer, but a Spencer who’d do as he’d say.

And if she was right, she knew that she’d do anything she could to stop that happening.

Anything.

 

The blizzard that Hotch was sure didn’t exist blew over in a sudden squall as she slowed on the highway, headlights illuminating the battered phone booth still standing there. The world went from calm and peaceful to stormy in minutes, the snow kicking up on the icy ground as she pulled over and stepped out of her borrowed car. The cold was intense. It chilled her right through, making her hands fumble as they felt for a flashlight in the glove box. The one she found was small and light and did nothing against the absolute dark outside when she straightened and slammed the door shut.

But she wasn’t afraid of the dark.

The snow was another thing entirely. This wasn’t Spencer’s snow. It blew with intent, seemingly localised around her as she walked easily through the loose layer of it already building below her boots. Even as she trudged, it was getting deeper, and wetter, sucking at her shoes and oozing right through her pants. She’d left her cell phone in the car.

“Spencer?” she cried, hearing her voice vanish into the cruel wind. She stumbled, shoulder thumping into the glass of the phone box. For a second, as she glanced at it, she imagined the phone hanging from its cord, and she shuddered at the memory.

Then, she stepped around the booth, gripped her flashlight in one hand with the other on her gun, and strode unerringly down the slope she’d walked down once before. She knew that there were forests off to both sides, the highway behind her, and a fence up ahead. Despite having only ever been here once more, she knew it innately.

At the bottom of the slope, the snow was worse. The wind screamed at her, the snowfall turning vicious, the drifts she was now wading through deep enough that she felt her muscles begin to ache from the effort. But she had to keep going because, even as she pondered that she might be walking into something she wasn’t equipped to handle, her flashlight caught the shadows of the fence ahead.

As though bumped out of whatever box she’d stored them in since that night, memories slotted into place as she approached that fence. She remembered holding Spencer’s hand. She remembered telling him to never let go, no matter what. And she remembered telling him that it was okay that he was scared, that…

“You can’t be brave unless you’re a little bit scared,” Emily said now, the words whipped away by the wind. “That’s why people get scared—so they know it’s time to be brave. And now it’s time to be brave, Spencer. It’s time to…”

He was there.

He wasn’t moving. She couldn’t see his staff, just him curled on his side and half buried by that black-tainted snow… when she looked down at her legs, she found that the snow she was pushing through was darkened too, as though some terrible taint had seeped out of Spencer’s motionless body and was reaching towards her. And she couldn’t see if he was alone, or if Jack was there—

He moved. Or, at least, she thought for a moment that he’d moved, and then she realised; he was curled around someone. Just like he’d curled around her that day, just the same as he’d tried to protect her—and, just like that day, he’d fallen first.

Emily began to run, almost falling over in the snow until she came to a skidding stop beside Spencer, digging at the snow until she revealed the barely shivering Jack wrapped in Spencer’s cold arms.

“Jack,” she breathed, dropping the flashlight as she leaned down to pick him up. “Hey, kid. Hey. Come here.”

He was barely conscious. She hugged the toddler tight, stripping her coat from herself and wrapping it around him before stumbling back up to her feet.

“Spencer, wake up,” she pleaded with him, unable to shake him or check for a pulse she didn’t even know if he had anymore while she was busy hugging Jack tight. And it was freezing with her arms bared, her back soaked through in seconds and her own shaking beginning to slow. “Spence, please. Come on, kid—get up. Whatever he did to you, you can shake it off. He can’t kill you _twice.”_

“Oh, I think I can,” said a low voice behind her. Slowly with Jack in her arms, Emily turned. Foyet stood there. “And I think I can probably do what that storm didn’t manage, Emily… you’ll finally be able to find out how he felt as he died.”

He was holding Spencer’s staff. The knobbly wood, which Emily had gotten almost used to seeing traced through with the fine lines of Spencer’s frost, was blackened and knotted.

“Cold,” mumbled Jack against her chest. Emily’s heart slowed, her entire body registering just how much trouble they were in. “M’cold…”

Not once did his sluggish gaze slip to where Foyet stood.

“Let us go,” she said, stepping sideways to stop him circling around her to where Spencer lay prone behind her. “We can’t give you what you want. Jack isn’t scared of you, he doesn’t believe in you. He doesn’t even see you, does he?”

It was a gamble, but she was the betting type.

“And I’m not scared of you,” she added, seeing Foyet sneer. The black on the staff quickened, snaking up the length of it. The wind screamed as though it was hurting. “Not even a little. You’re not _my_ fear. I wasn’t even scared that night, not like I should have been—I was too busy being brave for Spencer, remember? Nothing for you to feed on.”

“He was plenty scared for the both of you,” snapped Foyet. “That’s why I was created, you know. You were _both_ supposed to die. The ultimate sacrifice from two snot-nosed little brats, one representing the _hope_ and the other the _courage._ Don’t you see, you stupid girl? You’re both supposed to be a counter to children’s nightmares—” He jerked the staff up at the moonless sky, the clouds low and purplish. “—because without _him_ there’s no hope and without _you_ , there’s no courage—there’s just me. There’s just _fear_. And fear without a counter… consumes everything in its path.”

Emily took a step back as Foyet approached, her heart thumping so hard she could barely hear his triumphant declaration:

“Not long now,” he snarled. Emily turned, looking down. The snow around Spencer was black all the way through, the stain of it beginning to seep into his hair, his skin. It looked like a vine working its way into him, turning everything in its path inside him into the same blackness that had consumed Foyet. The same fear. “He should have just kept running, the idiot. He knew he wasn’t strong enough to face me alone.”

She put Jack down, encouraging him back into the cradle of Spencer’s arms with the coat pulled tight around him, before she turned and drew her weapon.

“If you want him, you’ll have to go through me,” she said quietly and without much hope. From the darkness surrounding, she could see bright points of light blinking. Eyes. Countless eyes. Spencer had said that this creature, this thing of fear and darkness, had followers. They were here.

“No, I don’t,” said Foyet. “You see, dear, you didn’t die that day. So there’s not a damn thing you can do to save him, and all because he saved your life first. How ironic.”

He raised the staff.

Emily fired.

And the world exploded. Foyet not only brought the blizzard crashing down solely upon them, he also drew the snow that was already on the ground up to join the fray. Suddenly there was ice and wind everywhere, Emily feeling herself getting picked up and thrown down. It hurt, a lot, her entire body stabbing with pain that she refused to register, even as a deep-seated ache in her gut told her she’d been hit by something. Instead, because she’d always been about furious courage in the face of death, she got up again and again, no matter how many times he used his murderous powers against her.

Suddenly, she found what she was looking for; she reached into the dark and the cold he’d used to obscure the world, found something to hang onto, and grabbed onto it grimly. As soon as her cold fingers curled around it, the storm dropped. Silence fell.

She was holding the staff.

Foyet looked shocked, looking down at their fingers entwined.

“Give it to me,” Emily snarled, tasting copper. Distantly in the new quiet, she could hear sirens approaching. “It’s _ours_. We created it, _we_ did. Me and Spencer, not you.”

Now she could see his followers, the creatures Spencer had warned of. They were nightmarish creatures, twisted horses made of the same cruel sand Foyet himself was made of. They screeched and pawed at the ground when she made eye-contact with each of them, but none approached.

“Spencer created _me,”_ snapped Foyet. “He needed me—you abandoned him and he was alone, so he created me. You have no power over me.”

“Bullshit.” Emily clung to the staff even though her legs were threatening to give way, some terrible pain in her core dragging her apart and down into the red-stained snow. “You’re not worth my time, so let _go.”_

And, on _go_ , she launched forward and slammed her shoulder into his chest, driving him into the snow. Shocked by the sudden move, he fell back into the snow… and let go.

Staff in hand, Emily tumbled back, managing to keep her feet somehow until she was falling beside Spencer and pressing it into his cold hands. Jack was looking up at her through glazed eyes, still conscious but only barely, and Spencer looked how he had that day: perfect, and dead.

“Wake up,” she pleaded him, hearing Foyet stagger up behind her. “Spence, please. Come on.”

Footsteps approached. She refused to look, shrugging her shoulders in as she scooted closer and lifted Spencer’s head into her lap. With her other hand, she coaxed Jack up too, until she was holding them both with one arm wrapped around them, the other hand holding Spencer’s fingers to the staff.

“We’re _not_ afraid of you,” she called out over her shoulder, letting go of the breath she’d been holding. “We don’t even believe in you, we can’t feel you. Spencer? I can feel _him_ , he’s real, but you’re not. You’re just a figment of his imagination… and you can’t hurt us.”

Silence.

She turned. The snow was speckled with red, churned through, but Foyet wasn’t there. Or, if he was, she couldn’t see him. She could see his creatures though. _They_ were still there, watching her curiously and no longer pawing and snorting as though all the anger in the world was riling them. One of them stepped closer, its hooves leaving no mark in the snow as Emily’s vision wavered. It leaned down, nosing at her side… and she looked down too.

“Oh, crap,” Emily breathed, touching the ice that had torn through her. “Oh…”

She closed her eyes and pondered this. The creatures were still there.

“Do they feed on fear too?” she asked the silent clearing, opening her eyes and looking up to where the moon hung low in a thin break in the clouds. “They do, don’t they? So if he wakes up alone, he’s just going to create another creature like Foyet—another nightmare.”

The moon said nothing, but she hadn’t really expected it to. Out of everything, she rather thought that _that_ part of Spencer’s tale—that the moon had spoken to him—was the most unlikely. But, just in case, she made sure they were on the same ground.

“Me for Jack,” she told the moon, if he was listening, hugging the little boy close. “I’ll go with Spence, but only if Jack lives. Understood? He didn’t choose this, not like we did.”

And then she closed her eyes and waited for something, man or moon, to wake her.


	4. Epilogue

There was no body.

They found Jack wrapped in Emily’s bloodstained coat, but no body beside it. Blood in the snow and speckled on Jack’s skin as he sleepily reached up to hold his dad tight, but no Emily. Not even a whisper of her presence.

“Take Jack,” Hotch ordered JJ, handing his son over despite it being the last thing he wanted to do right now—all he wanted was to be in the ambulance beside him, ensuring that he was okay, but he had a duty to his team and especially to the woman who’d come out here to save his son and was now missing because of it. “Stay with him. We’ll keep looking.”

“Hotch, you should be with Jack—” JJ tried, but he wouldn’t be dissuaded. Dave didn’t even try.

“Find her,” Hotch told those that remained, unable to hide his desperation. She couldn’t be gone. She _couldn’t._ He refused to lose an agent. “Find her!”

But, in the end, they didn’t; he did.

 

The blizzard had stopped as suddenly as it had started. Hotch found himself following a trail into those woods, a strangely iced over slide that dipped and weaved like whoever had been making it had been racing around gleefully. The others fell behind him, their voices calling for Emily—but he’d stopped calling. He just followed that ice deeper into the woods, the snow underfoot becoming shallower and crunching under his shoes. Eyes locked on the ground and he didn’t look up, not until he heard the giggle.

“Emily?” he called gently, looking around. A frozen lake stretched out in front of him, pristine in the winter quiet. And, on a whim, he added, “Spencer?”

Another giggle, this one mirrored by another. There were children out here.

Despite the muffling sound, he heard the small feet fleeing him deeper into the woods, skirting the edge of that lake. He followed, heart in his throat and face aching from the cold as the trail he was following dipped low and vanished into a small gully. Icicles lined one side, oddly stuck to the wall. As though in a dream, Hotch raised his hand and traced it along that line of ice, remembering suddenly being nine and rattling a stick across a fence in much the same manner.

He stepped out into the small clearing at the end of that gully, finding them sitting there waiting. Spencer drawing pictures on the ground out of ice using the end of his staff and Emily cross-legged and petting some strange creature that seemed made out of night itself. Hotch’s hand drifted automatically to his gun when he saw that creature, the savage looking equine-like beast, but he lowered it. Emily didn’t seem frightened.

They said nothing for a moment, Spencer finishing his drawing with a savage twirl of his staff before leaping up and hanging in the air as he studied Hotch closely. And Hotch, while he gathered his thoughts, closed his eyes and just… breathed through it.

“Why are you sad?” asked Spencer. It was undoubtably him. Hotch wished he could say it was otherwise, just as he wished he could argue the impossibility of Emily sitting there looking as though she’d never aged a day beyond thirteen, her hair darker than midnight and eyes darker still. “This isn’t sad. We can play forever now, and we’ll always visit.”

“Oh, we’re going to visit,” cackled Emily, leaping up and darting over to bounce beside Spencer, standing on the tips of her toes as she grinned at Hotch. He had trouble focusing on her; her dress shifted in his gaze like it was made of lights and shadows and the barest hint of stars, her gaze as eternal as the night. “Imagine how much _fun_ we can have with Morgan now.”

Spencer whooped, leaping down and darting away, snow beginning to fall behind him as he conjured a snowball out of nowhere and hurled it at Emily, who let it hit her and laughed with the delight of it.

Hotch watched them play, unable to verbalise everything he was feeling in the face of this.

“I’m sorry,” he said finally, Emily skidding to a stop as she glanced back at him, looking bored with the conversation already. “I… you’re gone, aren’t you?”

“No,” said Emily cheekily, spreading her hands and gesturing around. Hotch jerked back as he saw what looked like the black sand that Foyet had slashed him open with spooling from her open palms—then he looked again and realised the sand she was playing with was a shifting hue of every kind of black and shot through with white too. It wasn’t unkind or cruel, it just _was._ “I’m right here, duh. You can see me, can’t you? You should trust your eyes, Aaron, they’re not as silly as the rest of you.”

“Don’t be rude,” Spencer scolded from atop his staff, sitting in mid-air like it was nothing strange at all. Maybe, for him, it wasn’t. “You’re being rude, Emily.”

Emily stuck her tongue out at him.

“I got you killed,” Hotch managed, despite feeling a little as though he should be asking their parents if they wanted him to have this conversation with them even though, the last he’d checked, Emily _had_ been in her thirties. “You died saving my son. I can’t express how much—”

“Pfft,” Emily scoffed, rolling her eyes at him. “Nonsense. I chose this. Now, if you don’t mind, we’ve got a lot of catching up to do. Isn’t that right, Spence?”

“I’m going to show her the _world!”_ Spencer exclaimed. “The winds know all the secrets and they’ll take us if we ask nicely.”

“So we gotta go,” Emily finished resolutely. “Because there’s a whole lotta world waiting to be seen. Aaron?”

He looked at her.

“Don’t look for what I left behind,” she said, for the first time looking solemn. “We hid it real good because I don’t want people being sad over something I picked. Okay?”

He could have argued, explained that burying the dead was an important part of mourning—but that would have involved telling this childlike spirit of the girl who had once been Emily Prentiss that her death was going to grieve them greatly. He wasn’t sure he wanted to do this, and mar the beginning of what they seemed sure was going to be a great adventure.

Spencer took Emily’s hand and led her from that clearing, both of them waving until they faded from sight and left Hotch standing there alone.

 _“See you next winter,”_ he heard whispered from the trees, and then they were gone and he had no idea how to explain what he’d just seen to the others.

 

In the end, he didn’t have to.

They grieved, absolutely. They all knew Emily was gone, and Hotch never quite found the words to explain that she _was_ gone… but not completely. He kept meaning to and meaning to, until suddenly it had been almost a year and winter was here again.

And really, it should have been obvious, really, that she’d never been gone, because none of them had nightmares anymore. Hotch didn’t know if the others dreamed the same as him, although he did hear a few of them talking about their relief over their dreams being kinder; his always ended the same way. If they started turning torturous, nightmares of Foyet or their work or of finding Emily dead, he’d find a small dreamlike hand in his as, in his dream, someone led him away from whatever was frightening him.

“It’s okay to be scared,” that person told him every time. “Just don’t let it consume you—use it to be _brave.”_

And he’d find himself telling Jack much the same, whenever Jack woke from his own troubled dreams.

Confirmation that Hotch hadn’t quite imagined the scene in the gully came with the first snow, waking up to find that there was a perfect handprint frosted into his car windshield. When he arrived at work, it was to find Morgan grumpily brushing snow from his clothes.

“It was bizarre,” he was telling Garcia as Hotch walked in. “These snowballs came out of nowhere and I _swear_ I could hear the kids throwing them laughing at me, but I’ll be damned if I could find them.”

“I found this on my pillow,” Garcia said, pulling from her pocket a perfectly shaped kitten sculpted from ice. Hotch took it, examining it carefully and finding that within its icy depths, he could see points of light that sparkled like stars among the suggestion of darkness. “What does it mean?”

“It means we should go for a drive tonight,” Hotch said, deciding to be brave and hope. “I think there are some people waiting to say hello to us.”

 

That night, he drove them out to a nearby lake that shouldn’t have been frozen over this early in the season. It was on a whim, going just an hour out of the DC suburbs, but he assumed that they could always find them, no matter where they went.

“Are you going to tell us what this is about?” Morgan asked. Rossi just smiled, helping JJ from the car. Garcia, of all of them, looked more excited than worried. “You’re acting weird, Hotch.”

“It’s time I told you something about Emily’s death,” Hotch said finally, as they walked down the slope towards the lake that, sure enough, he could see was frozen solid.

“Oh!” gasped Garcia. For a moment, Hotch thought she’d tripped; seconds later, he realised she’d simply seen them waiting. And, when he turned, there they were just as they’d always be: the boy with his winter staff and the girl cloaked in darkness sitting right beside him. Neither waved, although both were smiling.

Overwhelmed with the gravity of the moment, Hotch only saw the snowball waiting in Emily’s hand when it was far, far too late to do anything about it.


End file.
